II

Let us pick up the threads of the development once more.

The history of the Constituent National Assembly since the June days is
the history of the domination and the disintegration of the republican
faction of the bourgeoisie, of the faction known by the names of
tricolor republicans, pure republicans, political republicans,
formalist republicans, etc.

Under the bourgeois monarchy of Louis Philippe it had formed the
official republican opposition and consequently a recognized component
part of the political world of the day. It had its representatives in
the Chambers and a considerable sphere of influence in the press. Its
Paris organ, the National, was considered just as respectable in its
way as the Journal des Débats. Its character corresponded to this
position under the constitutional monarchy. It was not a faction of the
bourgeoisie held together by great common interests and marked off by
specific conditions of production. It was a clique of republican-minded
bourgeois, writers, lawyers, officers, and officials that owed its
influence to the personal antipathies of the country to Louis Philippe,
to memories of the old republic, to the republican faith of a number of
enthusiasts, above all, however, to French nationalism, whose hatred of
the Vienna treaties[79] and of the alliance with England it stirred up
perpetually. A large part of the following the National had under Louis
Philippe was due to this concealed imperialism, which could
consequently confront it later, under the republic, as a deadly rival
in the person of Louis Bonaparte. It fought the aristocracy of finance,
as did all the rest of the bourgeois opposition. Polemics against the
budget, which in France were closely connected with fighting the
aristocracy of finance, procured popularity too cheaply and material
for puritanical leading articles too plentifully not to be exploited.
The industrial bourgeoisie was grateful to it for its slavish defense
of the French protectionist system, which it accepted, however, more on
national grounds than on grounds of national economy; the bourgeoisie
as a whole, for its vicious denunciation of communism and socialism.
For the rest, the party of the National was purely republican; that is,
it demanded a republican instead of a monarchist form of bourgeois rule
and, above all, the lion’s share of this rule. About the conditions of
this transformation it was by no means clear in its own mind. On the
other hand, what was clear as daylight to it, and was publicly
acknowledged at the reform banquets in the last days of Louis Philippe,
was its unpopularity with the democratic petty bourgeois, and in
particular with the revolutionary proletariat. These pure republicans,
as is indeed the way with pure republicans, were already at the point
of contenting themselves in the first instance with a regency of the
Duchess of Orleans[80] when the February Revolution broke out and assigned
their best-known representatives a place in the Provisional Government.
From the start they naturally had the confidence of the bourgeoisie and
a majority in the Constituent National Assembly. The socialist elements
of the Provisional Government were excluded forthwith from the
Executive Commission which the National Assembly formed when it met,
and the party of the National took advantage of the outbreak of the
June insurrection to discharge the Executive Commission[81] also, and
therewith to get rid of its closest rivals, the petty-bourgeois, or
democratic, republicans (Ledru-Rollin, etc.). Cavaignac, the general of
the bourgeois-republican part who commanded the June massacre, took the
place of the Executive Commission with a sort of dictatorial power.
Marrast, former editor in chief of the National, became the perpetual
president of the Constituent National Assembly, and the ministries, as
well as all other important posts, fell to the portion of the pure
republicans.

The republican bourgeois faction, which had long regarded itself as the
legitimate heir of the July Monarchy, thus found its fondest hopes
exceeded; it attained power, however, not as it had dreamed under Louis
Philippe, through a liberal revolt of the bourgeoisie against the
throne, but through a rising of the proletariat against capital, a
rising laid low with grapeshot. What it had conceived as the most
revolutionary event turned out in reality to be the most
counterrevolutionary. The fruit fell into its lap, but it fell from the
tree of knowledge, not from the tree of life.

The exclusive rule of the bourgeois republicans lasted only from June
24 to December 10, 1848. It is summed up in the drafting of a
republican constitution and in the state of siege of Paris.

The new constitution was at bottom only the republicanized edition of
the constitutional Charter of 1830.[82] The narrow electoral qualification
of the July Monarchy, which excluded even a large part of the
bourgeoisie from political rule, was incompatible with the existence of
the bourgeois republic. In lieu of this qualification, the February
Revolution had at once proclaimed direct universal suffrage. The
bourgeois republicans could not undo this event. They had to content
themselves with adding the limiting proviso of a six months’ residence
in the constituency. The old organization of the administration, the
municipal system, the judicial system, the army, etc., continued to
exist inviolate, or, where the constitution changed them, the change
concerned the table of contents, not the contents; the name, not the
subject matter.

The inevitable general staff of the liberties of 1848, personal
liberty, liberty of the press, of speech, of association, of assembly,
of education and religion, etc., received a constitutional uniform
which made them invulnerable. For each of these liberties is proclaimed
as the absolute right of the French citoyen, but always with the
marginal note that it is unlimited so far as it is not limited by the
“equal rights of others and the public safety” or by “laws” which are
intended to mediate just this harmony of the individual liberties with
one another and with the public safety. For example:

“The citizens have
the right of association, of peaceful and unarmed assembly, of petition
and of expressing their opinions, whether in the press or in any other
way. The enjoyment of these rights has no limit save the equal rights
of others and the public safety.”

“Education is free. Freedom of education shall be enjoyed under the conditions
fixed by law and under the supreme control of the state.”

“The home of every citizen is inviolable except in the forms prescribed by law.”

The constitution, therefore, constantly refers to future organic laws which are to put
into affect those marginal notes and regulate the enjoyment of these
unrestricted liberties in such manner that they will collide neither
with one another nor with the public safety. And later these organic
laws were brought into being by the friends of order and all those
liberties regulated in such manner that the bourgeoisie in its
enjoyment of them finds itself unhindered by the equal rights of the
other classes. Where it forbids these liberties entirely to “the
others,” or permits enjoyment of them under conditions that are just so
many police traps, this always happens solely in the interest of
“public safety” – that is, the safety of the bourgeoisie – as the
constitution prescribes. In the sequel, both sides accordingly appeal
with complete justice to the constitution: the friends of order, who
abrogated all these liberties, as well as the democrats, who demanded
all of them. For each paragraph of the constitution contains its own
antithesis, its own upper and lower house, namely, liberty in the
general phrase, abrogation of liberty in the marginal note. Thus so
long as the name of freedom was respected and only its actual
realization prevented, of course in a legal way, the constitutional
existence of liberty remained intact, inviolate, however mortal the
blows dealt to its existence in actual life.

This constitution, made inviolable in so ingenious a manner, was
nevertheless, like Achilles, vulnerable in one point – not in the
heel, but in the head, or rather in the two heads it wound up with: the
Legislative Assembly on the one hand, the President on the other.
Glance through the constitution and you will find that only the
paragraphs in which the relationship of the President to the
Legislative Assembly is defined are absolute, positive,
noncontradictory, and cannot be distorted. For here it was a question
of the bourgeois republicans safeguarding themselves. Articles 45-70 of
the Constitution are so worded that the National Assembly can remove
the President constitutionally, whereas the President can remove the
National Assembly only unconstitutionally, only by setting aside the
constitution itself. Here, therefore, it challenges its forcible
destruction. It not only sanctifies the division of powers, like the
Charter of 1830, it widens it into an intolerable contradiction. The
play of the constitutional powers, as Guizot termed the parliamentary
squabble between the legislative and executive power, is in the
constitution of 1848 continually played va-banque[staking all]. On
one side are seven hundred and fifty representatives of the people,
elected by universal suffrage and eligible for re-election; they form an
uncontrollable, indissoluble, indivisible National Assembly, a National
Assembly that enjoys legislative omnipotence, decides in the last
instance on war, peace, and commercial treaties, alone possesses the
right of amnesty, and, by its permanence, perpetually holds the front
of the stage. On the other side is the President, with all the
attributes of royal power, with authority to appoint and dismiss his
ministers independently of the National Assembly, with all the
resources of the executive power in his hands, bestowing all posts and
disposing thereby in France of the livelihoods of at least a million
and a half people, for so many depend on the five hundred thousand
officials and officers of every rank. He has the whole of the armed
forces behind him. He enjoys the privilege of pardoning individual
criminals, of suspending National Guards, of discharging, with the
concurrence of the Council of State, general, cantonal, and municipal
councils elected by the citizens themselves. Initiative and direction
are reserved to him in all treaties with foreign countries. While the
Assembly constantly performs on the boards and is exposed to daily
public criticism, he leads a secluded life in the Elysian Fields, and
that with Article 45 of the constitution before his eyes and in his
heart, crying to him daily: “Frere, il faut mourir!”
[‘Brother, one must die!’][83]
Your power ceases on the second Sunday of the lovely month
of May in the fourth year after your election! Then your glory is at an
end, the piece is not played twice, and if you have debts, look to it
quickly that you pay them off with the 600,000 francs granted you by
the constitution, unless, perchance, you prefer to go to Clichy[84] on the
second Monday of the lovely month of May! Thus, whereas the
constitution assigns power to the President, it seeks to secure moral
power for the National Assembly. Apart from the fact that it is
impossible to create a moral power by paragraphs of law, the
constitution here abrogates itself once more by having the President
elected by all Frenchmen through direct suffrage. While the votes of
France are split up among the seven hundred and fifty members of the
National Assembly, they are here, on the contrary, concentrated on a
single individual. While each separate representative of the people
represents only this or that party, this or that town, this or that
bridgehead, or even only the mere necessity of electing someone as the
seven hundred and fiftieth, without examining too closely either the
cause or the man, he is the elect of the nation and the act of his
election is the trump that the sovereign people plays once every four
years. The elected National Assembly stands in a metaphysical relation,
but the elected President in a personal relation, to the nation. The
National Assembly, indeed, exhibits in its individual representatives
the manifold aspects of the national spirit, but in the President this
national spirit finds its incarnation. As against the Assembly, he
possesses a sort of divine right; he is President by the grace of the
people.

Thetis, the sea goddess, prophesied to Achilles that he would die in
the bloom of youth. The constitution, which, like Achilles, had its
weak spot, also had, like Achilles, a presentiment that it must go to
an early death. It was sufficient for the constitution-making pure
republicans to cast a glance from the lofty heaven of their ideal
republic at the profane world to perceive how the arrogance of the
royalists, the Bonapartists, the democrats, the communists, as well as
their own discredit, grew daily in the same measure as they approached
the completion of their great legislative work of art, without Thetis
on this account having to leave the sea and communicate the secret to
them. They sought to cheat destiny by a catch in the constitution,
through Article III according to which every motion for a revision of
the constitution must be supported by at least three-quarters of the
votes, cast in three successive debates with an entire month between
each, with the added proviso that not less than five hundred members of
the National Assembly must vote. Thereby they merely made the impotent
attempt to continue exercising a power – when only a parliamentary
minority, as which they already saw themselves prophetically in their
mind’s eye – a power which at that time, when they commanded a
parliamentary majority and all the resources of governmental authority,
was daily slipping more and more from their feeble hands.

Finally the constitution, in a melodramatic paragraph, entrusts itself
“to the vigilance and the patriotism of the whole French people and
every single Frenchman,” after it has previously entrusted in another
paragraph the “vigilant” and “patriotic” to the tender, most
painstaking care of the High Court of Justice, the haute cour it
invented for the purpose.

Such was the Constitution of 1848, which on December 2, 1851, was not
overthrown by a head, but fell down at the touch of a mere hat; this
hat, to be sure, was a three-cornered Napoleonic hat.

While the bourgeois republicans in the Assembly were busy devising,
discussing, and voting this constitution, Cavaignac outside the
Assembly maintained the state of siege of Paris. The state of siege of
Paris was the midwife of the Constituent Assembly in its travail of
republican creation. If the constitution is subsequently put out of
existence by bayonets, it must not be forgotten that it was likewise by
bayonets, and these turned against the people, that it had to be
protected in its mother’s womb and by bayonets that it had to be
brought into existence. The forefathers of the “respectable
republicans” had sent their symbol, the tricolor, on a tour around
Europe. They themselves in turn produced an invention that of itself
made its way over the whole Continent, but returned to France with ever
renewed love until it has now become naturalized in half her
departments – the state of siege. A splendid invention, periodically
employed in every ensuing crisis in the course of the French
Revolution. But barrack and bivouac, which were thus periodically laid
on French society’s head to compress its brain and render it quiet;
saber and musket, which were periodically allowed to act as judges and
administrators, as guardians and censors, to play policeman and do
night watchman’s duty; mustache and uniform, which were periodically
trumpeted forth as the highest wisdom of society and as its rector -
were not barrack and bivouac, saber and musket, mustache and uniform
finally bound to hit upon the idea of instead saving society once and
for all by proclaiming their own regime as the highest and freeing
civil society completely from the trouble of governing itself? Barrack
and bivouac, saber and musket, mustache and uniform were bound to hit
upon this idea all the more as they might then also expect better cash
payment for their higher services, whereas from the merely periodic
state of siege and the transient rescues of society at the bidding of
this or that bourgeois faction, little of substance was gleaned save
some killed and wounded and some friendly bourgeois grimaces. Should
not the military at last one day play state of siege in their own
interest and for their own benefit, and at the same time besiege the
citizens’ purses? Moreover, be it noted in passing, one must not forget
that Colonel Bernard, the same military commission president who under
Cavaignac had fifteen thousand insurgents deported without trial, is at
this moment again at the head of the military commissions active in
Paris.

Whereas with the state of siege in Paris, the respectable, the pure
republicans planted the nursery in which the praetorians of December 2,
1851, were to grow up, they on the other hand deserve praise for the
reason that, instead of exaggerating the national sentiment as under
Louis Philippe, they now, when they had command of the national power,
crawled before foreign countries, and instead of setting Italy free,
let her be reconquered by Austrians and Neapolitans.[85] Louis Bonaparte’s
election as President on December 10, 1848, put an end to the
dictatorship of Cavaignac and to the Constituent Assembly.

In Article 44 of the Constitution it is stated:

“The President of the French Republic must never have lost his status of French citizen.”

The first President of the French Republic, L. N. Bonaparte, had not merely
lost his status of French citizen, had not only been an English special
constable, he was even a naturalized Swiss.[86]

I have worked out elsewhere the significance of the election of
December 10. I will not revert to it here. It is sufficient to remark
here that it was a reaction of the peasants, who had had to pay the
costs of the February Revolution, against the remaining classes of the
nation; a reaction of the country against the town. It met with great
approval in the army, for which the republicans of the National had
provided neither glory nor additional pay; among the big bourgeoisie,
which hailed Bonaparte as a bridge to monarchy, among the proletarians
and petty bourgeois, who hailed him as a scourge for Cavaignac. I shall
have an opportunity later of going more closely into the relationship
of the peasants to the French Revolution.

The period from December 20, 1848, until the dissolution of the
Constituent Assembly in May, 1849, comprises the history of the
downfall of the bourgeois republicans. After having founded a republic
for the bourgeoisie, driven the revolutionary proletariat out of the
field, and reduced the democratic petty bourgeoisie to silence for the
time being, they are themselves thrust aside by the mass of the
bourgeoisie, which justly impounds this republic as its property. This
bourgeois mass was, however, royalist. One section of it, the large
landowners, had ruled during the Restoration and was accordingly
Legitimist. The other, the aristocrats of finance and big
industrialists, had ruled during the July Monarchy and was consequently
Orleanist. The high dignitaries of the army, the university, the
church, the bar, the academy, and the press were to be found on either
side, though in various proportions. Here, in the bourgeois republic,
which bore neither the name Bourbon nor the name Orleans, but the name
capital, they had found the form of state in which they could rule
conjointly. The June insurrection had already united them in the party
of Order. Now it was necessary, in the first place, to remove the
coterie of bourgeois republicans who still occupied the seats of the
National Assembly. Just as brutal as these pure republicans had been in
their misuse of physical force against the people, just as cowardly,
mealy-mouthed, broken-spirited, and incapable of fighting were they now
in their retreat, when it was a question of maintaining their
republicanism and their legislative rights against the executive power
and the royalists. I need not relate here the ignominious history of
their dissolution. They did not succumb; they passed out of existence.
Their history has come to an end forever, and, both inside and outside
the Assembly, they figure in the following period only as memories,
memories that seem to regain life whenever the mere name republic is
once more the issue and as often as the revolutionary conflict
threatens to sink down to the lowest level. I may remark in passing
that the journal which gave its name to this party, the National, was
converted to socialism in the following period.

Before we finish with this period we must still cast a retrospective
glance at the two powers, one of which annihilated the other on
December 2, 1851, whereas from December 20, 1848, until the exit of the
Constituent Assembly, they had lived in conjugal relations. We mean
Louis Bonaparte, on the one hand, and the part of the coalesced
royalists, the party of Order, of the big bourgeoisie, on the other. On
acceding to the presidency, Bonaparte at once formed a ministry of the
party of Order, at the head of which he placed Odilon Barrot, the old
leader, nota bene, of the most liberal faction of the parliamentary
bourgeoisie. M. Barrot had at last secured the ministerial portfolio
whose image had haunted him since 1830, and what is more, the
premiership in the ministry; but not, as he had imagined under Louis
Philippe, as the most advanced leader of the parliamentary opposition,
but with the task of putting a parliament to death, and as the
confederate of all his archenemies, Jesuits and Legitimists. He brought
the bride home at last, but only after she had been prostituted.
Bonaparte seemed to efface himself completely. This party acted for him.

The very first meeting of the council of ministers resolved on the
expedition to Rome, which, it was agreed, should be undertaken behind
the back of the National Assembly and the means for which were to be
wrested from it under false pretenses. Thus they began by swindling the
National Assembly and secretly conspiring with the absolutist powers
abroad against the revolutionary Roman republic.

In the same manner and with the same maneuvers Bonaparte prepared his
coup of December 2 against the royalist Legislative Assembly and its
constitutional republic. Let us not forget that the same party which
formed Bonaparte’s ministry on December 20, 1848, formed the majority
of the Legislative National Assembly on December 2, 1851.

In August the Constituent Assembly had decided to dissolve only after
it had worked out and promulgated a whole series of organic laws that
were to supplement the constitution. On January 6, 1849, the party of
Order had a deputy named Rateau move that the Assembly should let the
organic laws go and rather decide on its own dissolution. Not only the
ministry, with Odilon Barrot at its head, but all the royalist members
of the National Assembly told it in bullying accents then that its
dissolution was necessary for the restoration of credit, for the
consolidation of order, for putting an end to the indefinite
provisional arrangements and establishing a definitive state of
affairs; that it hampered the productivity of the new government and
sought to prolong its existence merely out of malice; that the country
was tired of it. Bonaparte took note of all this invective against the
legislative power, learned it by heart, and proved to the parliamentary
royalists, on December 2, 1851, that he had learned from them. He
repeated their own catchwords against them.

The Barrot Ministry and the party of Order went further. They caused
petitions to the National Assembly to be made throughout France, in
which this body was politely requested to decamp. They thus led the
unorganized popular masses into the fire of battle against the National
Assembly, the constitutionally organized expression of the people. They
taught Bonaparte to appeal against the parliamentary assemblies to the
people. At length, on January 29, 1849, the day had come on which the
Constituent Assembly was to decide concerning its own dissolution. The
National Assembly found the building where its sessions were held
occupied by the military; Changarnier, the general of the party of
Order, in whose hands the supreme command of the National Guard and
troops of the line had been united, held a great military review in
Paris, as if a battle were impending, and the royalists in coalition
threateningly declared to the Constituent Assembly that force would be
employed if it should prove unwilling. It was willing, and only
bargained for a very short extra term of life. What was January 29 but
the coup d’etat of December 2, 1851, only carried out by the royalists
with Bonaparte against the republican National Assembly? The gentlemen
did not observe, or did not wish to observe, that Bonaparte availed
himself of January 29, 1849, to have a portion of the troops march past
him in front of the Tuileries, and seized with avidity on just this
first public summoning of the military power against the parliamentary
power to foreshadow Caligula. They, to be sure, saw only their
Changarnier.

A motive that particularly actuated the party of Order in forcibly
cutting short the duration of the Constituent Assembly’s life was the
organic laws supplementing the constitution, such as the law on
education, the law on religious worship, etc. To the royalists in
coalition it was most important that they themselves should make these
laws and not let them be made by the republicans, who had grown
mistrustful. Among these organic laws, however, was also a law on the
responsibility of the President of the Republic. In 1851 the
Legislative Assembly was occupied with the drafting of just such a law,
when Bonaparte anticipated this coup with the coup of December 2. What
would the royalists in coalition not have given in their winter
election campaign of 1851 to have found the Responsibility Law ready to
hand, and drawn up, at that, by a mistrustful, hostile, republican
Assembly!

After the Constituent Assembly had itself shattered its last weapon on
January 29, 1849, the Barrot Ministry and the friends of order hounded
it to death, left nothing undone that could humiliate it, and wrested
from the impotent, self-despairing Assembly laws that cost it the last
remnant of respect in the eyes of the public. Bonaparte, occupied with
his fixed Napoleonic idea,[87] was brazen enough to exploit publicly this
degradation of the parliamentary power. For when on May 8, 1849, the
National Assembly passed a vote of censure of the ministry because of
the occupation of Civitavecchia by Oudinot, and ordered it to bring
back the Roman expedition to its alleged purpose,[88] Bonaparte published
the same evening in the Moniteur a letter to Oudinot in which he
congratulated him on his heroic exploits and, in contrast to the
ink-slinging parliamentarians, already posed as the generous protector
of the army. The royalists smiled at this. They regarded him simply as
their dupe. Finally, when Marrast, the President of the Constituent
Assembly, believed for a moment that the safety of the National
Assembly was endangered and, relying on the constitution, requisitioned
a colonel and his regiment, the colonel declined, cited discipline in
his support, and referred Marrast to Changarnier, who scornfully
refused him with the remark that he did not like
baionnettes intelligentes[intellectual bayonets].
In November, 1851, when the
royalists in coalition wanted to begin the decisive struggle with
Bonaparte, they sought to put through in their notorious Quaestors’
Bill the principle of the direct requisition of troops by the President
of the National Assembly.[89] One of their generals, Le Flo, had signed the
bill. In vain did Changarnier vote for it and Thiers pay homage to the
farsighted wisdom of the former Constituent Assembly. The War Minister,
Saint-Arnaud, answered him as Changarnier had answered Marrast – and
to the acclamation of the Montagne!

Thus the party of Order, when it was not yet the National Assembly,
when it was still only the ministry, had itself stigmatized the
parliamentary regime. And it makes an outcry when December 2, 1851,
banishes this regime from France!